Willem Frederik Hermans Volledige Werken Volledig!

Ever since I had to read a few books from Willem Frederik Hermans in high school I have been a fan of his work. I bought and read a number of his books over the years but when the project to publish all his works started and the first volume came out in 2005 I have been buying these volumes now and then whenever I remembered to look if a new volume had come out. The complete work consists of 24 books and by 2024 I had bought about two thirds of the collection. At that point it became an ambition to simply collect the complete 24 books. This turned out to be harder than expected because some of the later volumes contain collections of essays about various subjects that were never published in book form before and these books were not printed in large volume even in this collection. As a result the last 8 books I was missing were not available to order at my local bookshop. A few were still available in various bookstores online after which I still had 4 volumes that I could not find new in any bookstore. Luckily the second hand book market came to the rescue and over the period of half a year or so I managed to locate and buy the last volumes. Today, the last missing book, volume 20 arrived by mail and my collection is now complete. Because my unread book pile only keeps growing no matter how many books I read I am guessing it is going to take me another 24 years to get through this volledige werken.